


Blast Wave Phenomena

by TimTheToaster (tabletoptime)



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Wayne Has Issues, Canon-Typical Violence, and now lots of people have medical bills, set just before Tim goes to see Dick, when you just want to take photos but you end up traumatized instead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-01-29 07:34:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21406510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tabletoptime/pseuds/TimTheToaster
Summary: It had been this way for weeks.What used to be his favourite part of the day, following his heroes through the streets of Gotham, had become a lesson in waking nightmares. And walking ones, as Batman was doing his damnedest to be.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 119





	Blast Wave Phenomena

It had been this way for weeks.

What used to be his favourite part of the day, following his heroes through the streets of Gotham, had become a lesson in waking nightmares. And walking ones, as Batman was doing his damnedest to be.

On the notepad he always brought but had never really used until recently, Tim marked down another three tallies, and five small circles. Three more broken bones and five concussions. None of them necessary to take down a back alley drug deal between consenting, if stupid, adults. 

One man had tried to surrender, gotten down to his knees with his hands in the air.

Batman had kicked him in the jaw. That had been broken bone number two.

He didn’t even bother to restrain the men at all before pulling out his line and swinging away. Tim scrambled to follow, leaping from rusted fire escapes and climbing up ugly gutters, chasing the ripple of shining black that used to make his stomach swoop rather than curdle. This fight hadn’t needed an ambulance, but it was barely midnight and the next one might.

Batman certainly wasn’t calling emergency services. Not even the cops. 

Tim’s fingers were cold in the fingerless gloves, but he needed the dexterity for his phone, though he was pretty sure he could dial 911 in his sleep at this point. It was a hassle to fake a different voice for every call, but he could distinguish the different operators by voice and he understood how easy it would be for them to do the same to him. Secrecy was important. Someone had to be out here, doing this, and if they knew he was a kid they’d try to stop him.

It was a phase, Tim was sure it was just a phase. At the funeral no one knew he attended, Batman had looked like one of the old statues around them; chipped and cracked stone. It was perfectly understandable he needed to grieve and express his feelings the only way he seemed to know.

If Tim’s theories were correct, it was perfectly understandable what he did to the Joker. Commendable, even, that he hadn’t done worse. That had given Tim hope that the hero he looked up to was still there, buried under the pain. He hadn’t broken his rule, not even for the monster who killed his son. 

It was nasty and brutal, and Tim’s dreams were full of snapping bone and anguished cries, but it wasn’t forever. Just until Batman could manage the grief. Then things would be better again.

In the meantime, Tim would make sure those who were too injured to get themselves to a clinic would get help.

Rather than a noise, it was the absence of any hint of a landing that told Tim the next fight was about to start. He hurried to get there before the first blow. If he needed to report the incident, every piece of information he could get made a difference.

Peeking over the lip of the building, Tim half-wished he had been even just a little slower.

Some middle-aged man and a young dark-haired boy were in the middle of… well. Prostitution. Definitely at least two types of illegal, but also definitely not the kind of thing where Batman did more than just spook the adult away. 

But theatric fear-mongering had been traded for generating genuine terror.

Batman dropped behind the man mid-thrust and threw him headfirst into the brick wall. He ignored the shrieking boy entirely to turn and descend on the man in a brief flash of yellow accents that was devoured immediately by drowning, roiling black. His cape hid the worst of it, but the flex and movement of his shoulders in time with the fleshy crack of his fists made it all but  _ froth. _

A loud  _ snap _ , followed by a piercing scream, had the half-dressed boy running and Tim marking down another line. If it hadn’t been such a quiet night, Tim would have missed the next sounds; the faint noise of a magnetic snap coming undone and the wet sound of a blade sinking through skin. There was less a scream, and more a keening whimper. A rough snarl that Tim couldn’t distinguish, and a sobbed response. 

And then Batman was up again, leaving the man with his face swelling, his arm bent backwards, and blood leaking from his thighs.

Tim called that one in.

For the next few hours, Tim trailed the Bat, tallying injuries and calling in anything that looked like it would leave them there for more than a few hours. By three in the morning he had recorded over two dozen broken bones and thirteen concussions, and made seven phone calls. Tim was about to call it a night, since he had school in the morning, a half hour commute from here, and had been out an extra hour anyways, when he heard screaming.

God, he hoped it was a victim, not a criminal.

He booked it across two buildings, making a little more noise than he should have, and peered over the side to see the fight below. The buzzing, flickering street light turned it into a sickening series of snapshots.

It must have been the criminal screaming, because there was no victim in sight.

Batman had him pinned against the near wall and was hammering away at his face, 

his ribs, 

his gut.

He must have grabbed the man’s arm and flung him across the alley, because in a heartbeat the man was slamming into the dumpster, a wet  _ pop _ leaving his arm at an awkward angle. 

The man tried to stand, coughing blood that shone red-black for a second mid-air.

Batman was on him again, driving an elbow hard into his throat,

And his head snapped back into the metal, rattling the whole thing.

He started to fall, but Batman caught him with another blow to the stomach,

That left blood painting his chin, and eyes blown wide, looking right up at Tim on the roof,  _ right up at him _ .

His mouth moved soundlessly, as the wall of incensed darkness kicked his knee out of place and finally let him collapse. 

For a moment, a breath, a lifetime, Batman’s cape completely swallowed the fallen figure, hiding him from view, 

And then he was gone and Tim could see the man’s chest stutter briefly as he tried and failed to breathe and fall still, could see those eyes still wide open to the sky but not  _ seeing _ , and without a thought he slid down the gutter, tearing the skin from his fingertips and fraying his gloves. 

He ran to the crumpled form, pulling his phone out and dialing blind, thumbing it on speaker and dropping it beside him. Tim pressed two shaking fingers to his neck and begged for a pulse, eyes roving the damage he could see up close.

The phone rang.

Multiple dislocations, possible breaks. Head wound, possible spinal injury, shouldn’t move him but he  _ wasn’t breathing _ and Tim couldn’t feel a pulse. He hazily remembered skimming a first aid manual that outline CPR procedures. Every second the brain was without oxygen was a second closer to death, should Tim risk starting it now?

“911, what is your emergency?” Tim knew the voice, could place which operator it was if only he could think, but his head was full of static and the streetlight was  _ so loud _ .   
  
“There’s, a man- I’m with a man and I think he’s dying. I’m in an alley on, along 109th, between Maynard and. Maynard and Kennedy. He’s not breathing and I can’t feel a pulse, and he’s really beat up- he might have a spinal injury I don’t know-”

“Do you have any first aid training? Do you need me to walk you through CPR?” the voice was calm, was clear, with questions Tim gratefully latched onto. 

Questions. “I took a course in school, and I’ve read some manuals so I know the theory.”

“Okay, an ambulance is on the way and will be there soon. You need to lay him on his back and start compressions. Thirty, and then two breaths and repeat, can you do that?”

“Yea-yes I can. We’re in the alley with the flashing light in front.” Tim laced his fingers, locked his elbows, and bounced on the man’s sternum. The ribs bent easily, already broken and loose, and the feeling of them moving beneath flesh turned Tim’s stomach.

He loosely remembered, beneath his counting, that CPR was incredibly strenuous and hospitals often had teams cycle through performing it to ensure quality. He also was fairly sure most cases of CPR outside of hospital settings resulted in failure.

Tim tried not to listen to those thoughts.

After reaching thirty, Tim moved his aching arms to the man’s head, tilting his head back and pinching his nose to breath into his mouth. His lips tasted of wet copper.

One, two, and then Tim turned back to the man’s chest to see in the center of his shirt a nest of bloody lines from Tim’s hands.  _ Oh god-  _ but this wasn’t the time for hesitation, so Tim started another round, as the phone operator said something he couldn’t hear over the buzzing of the streetlight.

It was three rounds later that the scream of sirens cut through Tim’s awareness. 

He- He needed to help the man, but he couldn’t be here when the EMTs showed up or there would be questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. He should have been home an hour ago. It was the end of a cycle, he’d just finish it, grab the phone, and run.

Tim went up, pulling himself up on to the rooftop just as people with high-visibility stripes ran into the alley. Panting, he fumbled with his phone, ending the call on the third try and slicking blood across the casing. He hoped it was his. 

A distant part of him watched the EMTs resume the CPR, calling for an AED. He watched them attach the defibrillator, and set it off. 

He watched it fail.

They tried again, and this time it seemed to be successful because they carefully loaded the man into the back of the ambulance on a gurney. They wouldn’t be so careful with a dead man, right?

Tim fell back onto the rooftop and stared up at the clouded sky.

Normally, he would have been home by now. If he hadn’t stayed out late, that man would be dead. Batman would have killed him and left without a second thought, the way he came so close to doing tonight. Batman didn’t know about Tim, which meant, whether he noticed it or not, Batman had left a man to die by injuries  _ he _ inflicted. It wasn’t even the Joker, or another big name. Just some guy, out late at night and doing something he shouldn’t have. 

Tim didn’t even know what he’d done.

And Batman would have killed him for it.

That. Wasn’t acceptable. Whatever this  _ phase _ was, this kind of behaviour couldn’t continue, couldn’t be condoned. Looking through his notebook, Tim looked at the staggering amount of long-term injuries Batman had doled out in the last week alone. On the streets of Gotham a broken bone could lose someone their job, their home, their life. Just because he was Batman didn’t give him the right to do this to people. Something had to change.

Eventually, Tim climbed over a few rooftops and then down to the ground. His bus stop was another couple of blocks over, but he was pretty sure he would slip and fall if he tried to take the rooftops. The walk was cold and thankfully uninterrupted. Tim licked at his chapped lips, and tasted metal.

Oh. Right. He swiped at his mouth with the back of his hand, and tried not to think about anything in particular. It was streets away, but he could still hear the light, thrumming in his ears.

He walked the overly bright neighborhood to the gates of his parents’ house, then up the pitch path to the front door. No point sneaking in, no one was home.

In a haze, he stowed his bag and the clothes he walked the dark streets in. Muscle memory carried him through his nightly routine, though he would need to clean the pink stain from the drain at some point before the housekeeper could see it.

Every room and every hallway was empty and quiet, but even as he lay in bed, staring at the ceiling and waiting for sleep to come, he could hear the echo of the thought.

_ Something had to change. _

**Author's Note:**

> This has been rattling around my head for a while. I'm mostly satisfied with how it came out, but I'm mostly glad I've finally written it. It's got some weird stylistic stuff going on, but I can't say I don't like it. Hopefully other people do too. 
> 
> I've always wondered about just the kinds of things Tim could have seen and known to make him take action after years of silent observation. In this case, it gets pretty personal. Poor Tim.
> 
> On the medical stuff, I honestly don't really know dispatch procedure so I was winging that for the most part, but the little facts about CPR are true, if vague. It's an upper-body workout and if you do it wrong it stops helping so hospitals only let people do it for so long before swapping out. And when you're doing what is essentially very hands-on necromancy, it's understandable the success rate is pretty low. Even if the person survive, there's often at least some kind of brain damage. Movies lie, yo.
> 
> Leave a comment or a kudos if you're feeling it (in which case I will be endlessly thrilled and possibly say kind words of you to my cat), and if not thanks for reading anyways!


End file.
